Conditional Cash Transfer for Secondary Education: Impact Assessment of the Kanyashree Program in West Bengal
32 Pages Posted: 26 Sep 2019
Date Written: September 15, 2019
Abstract
Over the past two decades, conditional cash transfer programmes have gained importance to improve schooling outcomes and delay female child marriage. This paper evaluates the impact of one of such programme implemented in West Bengal (WB) since 2013 known as the Kanyashree Prakalpya (KP) on female schooling outcomes including enrollment and learning outcomes. Using data from Annual Status of Education (ASER) from 2011 to 2018, we employ double difference, triple difference and synthetic control methods to assess the impact of KP on female enrollment and learning outcomes. The findings indicate controlling for household factors as well as village level infrastructure, KP has been able to increase female enrollment significantly. However, no significant impact in learning outcomes is found and thus we couldn’t establish any connection between enrollment and educational attainment. We use DISE data to study school infrastructure and found them to be inadequate in WB possibly explaining the lack of gains in learning outcomes.
Keywords: Kanyashree, Conditional Cash Transfer, Triple Difference, Synthetic Control
JEL Classification: I21, I24, J16
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